When lasers meet chalkboard, beautiful art is born

As Andy Gikling shows in his work, not all lasers need to have the power to be used as a weapon, but rather can be used to create incredibly intricate detail that very few artists would be able to achieve by hand.

Describing the process of his creation, After Sunset, Gikling said he spent more than a year working on the design, having collated it from various sources including religious and mathematical symbols and famous pieces of art, before turning it into a CAD file.

The paintbrush in this instance was the LasX laser system’s Proton Laser Controller, which is designed specifically to create these types of artwork.

According to Gikling, the laser beam’s position is updated 100,000 times per second and was split into two processes, the first being the ‘raster’, which beams 1,500W of energy onto the pallet, cutting through the chalk to reach the wood, which when burned leaves the orange and brown colours.

Just to top off what is a masterpiece of science, mathematics and art, Gikling’s signature is written in binary as dots along the spine of After Sunset’s ‘golden ratio’ spiral. C’est magnifique!